[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement

[Kai Krueger]

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 
> It's everyone else who we have to worry about. In the last couple of
> months, I've personally noticed a national railway company, a charity with
> a turnover of >£100m, a vast firm of couriers, a magazine publisher, a
> book publisher, all infringing our requirements/requests for attribution
> and share-alike. (I've spotted these by chance: I don't go out there
> looking for this stuff.) Deliberate? In some cases, definitely. You
> wouldn't put an entirely fictitious credit to another organisation if you
> were just innocent of the niceties.
> 
With the value of the data going up, no doubt, more and more companies will
try to infringe the (spirit of the) license. That would be the case even
with the strongest license. Take a look for example at the GPL. It has been
upheld in several court cases in a variety of jurisdictions and a variety of
settings. In contrast, I am not aware of a single court case, where the GPL
was deamed unenforceable. So that is kind of the strongest a license can be.
Nevertheless one regularly reads about cases where companies large and small
deliberately infringe on the GPL. Presumably as they hope that no one will
notice or bother to sue them.

So the question is possibly less how many people / companies try to infringe
on the license (that probably more reflects the value of the data then the
strength of the license), but how do they react once confronted with the
infringement, once one threatens legal action and ultimately how the case
would be decided in front of court, should it ever get that far.

Even though so far there haven't been any significant large scale
infringement's, if OSM continues to grow and thrive, eventually there will
very likely be one, independent of what license OSM is using.

At the moment beyond how people/companies react to "confrontation with
infringement" appears unknown for both CC-BY-SA as well as ODbL, although
one can hope and expect that ODbL is more enforceable given that it was
designed specifically for databases.

Btw. Given that there have been several cases of infringement of the license
by now, some of which OSMF has been involved in dealing with, what would be
the case where there was the most trouble in trying to enforce it and what
was their line of argument in their defense?



Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 
> No, Google, Tele Atlas and Navteq aren't infringing OSM's licence.
> Everyone else is, though.
> 
Well, indirectly Google has infringed on OSM's license through one of their
"subsidiary" data providers (e.g. in Colombia) and I have heard of several
alleged other cases, although by the sounds of it, there was not enough
evidence to pursue it further.

Given the experience with large scale companies infringing on GPL code, it
wouldn't surprise me if eventually even Google, Tele Atlas and Navteq would
attempt it. However, that would likely take a lot longer. Alone the fact
that they would have to admit that OSM has better data then them, is likely
a deterrent for quite a while.

Kai 


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